Windows 10 May 2019 Update Feature Focus: Light Themes And Sandboxes

What’s Still Coming

At Build this year, Microsoft announced a new version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will run a true Linux kernel. This will improve performance dramatically in certain scenarios, and increase the compatibility as well. The original WSL translated Linux system calls into Windows system calls, which causes a performance hit that the new version won’t need to do, since it’ll have a Linux VM running instead. The original WSL will still be available, since there are scenarios where WSL v2 may cause interoperability issues, such as if you want to run virtualization applications like VirtualBox, because WSL v2 will be using a Hyper-V backend. But the team is working on fixes and WSL v2 should be available to test in insider preview builds starting in June. If you missed our original announcement, check it out here.

Microsoft has also been making a lot of changes to the console to improve its usability, but they are running into limits where changes may break backwards compatibility. As such, they will be launching a new Windows Terminal application which will allow you to run multiple console sessions in a tabbed interface. It looks amazing if you use a lot of command line in Windows.

Probably the most important update coming is that Microsoft is replacing their web browser experience with one based on the Chromium project. It’ll still be called Edge, but the company has clearly decided it no longer makes sense to develop their own rendering engine when developers won’t test against it, so by going the Chromium route they’ll have a much better compatibility. The web was supposed to be the new open world, but in practice it has never been that way. The dominant browser of any time period is the one that web developers target against. For years that was Internet Explorer. On mobile, it was Safari for a period as well, but now the leading browser is Google Chrome. It’s a decision that makes sense for Microsoft, even if it’s a sad day for the web to lose a major rendering engine. If you want to give it a try, you can run it side-by-side with normal Edge, or any other browser. You can download it here.

Microsoft’s Your Phone app is also getting an update soon to provide more functionality with Android devices, including screen sharing, and notification support. I’ve had mixed results with Your Phone since it debuted, with periods of time where it just would not sync with my phone no matter what I did, but recent updates have seemed to help. It’s still pretty slow and clunky, but I’m hopeful for improvements since it should be a genuinely useful app.